Target Audience

Healthcare professionals. 

Educational Need

Current practitioners and research have confirmed that stressful thinking negatively impacts health. The presenters will provide information which identifies the following gap: current practitioners and patients see stress as created from external circumstances. Presenters will provide proof that stress is determined by the internal thinking/feeling and processing of the individual patient. When people realize that the thinking is coming from them and not the external stressors, they find that an immediate opportunity for stress relief and healing is revealed.

Day 1: The Brain-Body Connection: Why an Understanding of Mind is Vital to Our Health

Bill, a psychiatrist and educator, has a gift for making the medical sciences accessible and showing how past and current research inevitably harmonizes with the logic of the Three Principles. Bill has been certified in numerous specialties including: general, adolescent and geriatric psychiatry, as well as addiction medicine and psychosomatic medicine. During this program, Bill, supported by Linda will weave personal stories, over 50 years of clinical experience, and a store of medical knowledge into a practical understanding of the healing nature of the Three Principles.

The Problem

Bill will show how chronic mental stress, (e.g., guilt, resentment, unresolved grief, feeling driven, worry, over-analysis, investment in what others think about us, and frustration related to the inability to control others’ behavior) leads to the chronic activation of the body's emergency stress response. This response is designed to be called upon for up to 30 minutes to assist us to survive life-threatening emergencies.

When prolonged, this response manifests in massive shifts in hormones, a powerful inflammatory reaction and reallocation of internal resources, such as the immune system, away from their usual function of ensuring growth, health and optimal functioning.

The body alerts us to chronic activation of the stress response through progressive internal feelings of dis-ease and physical symptoms. If these symptoms are not understood as helpful alarms, additional progressive physical deregulation and "illness" (i.e., a louder alarm) often occurs.

The Solution

An incremental understanding of Mind, the formless energy that uses our brain is both preventative (a vaccine) and curative. Being aware of this understanding produces an internal experience of life that is gentler, more joyful, more loving, and more present. This leads to a higher level of emotional, psychological and physical health. This health is incrementally independent of past painful experience, present challenges, and future uncertainty.

Day 2: The Medicine of Wisdom: How the Power of Love Guides and Heals Us

Linda, a counseling psychologist, educator and writer, has a gentle, matter-of-fact way of making the spiritual nature of the Three Principles accessible and practical. She blends fascination with her direct experience of the mystical nature of the Principles with respect for the knowledge she gained while practicing 36 years as clinician, coach and counselor educator. Her teaching resume includes masters and doctoral courses in: psychological theory, ethics, research, counseling skills, group facilitation, lifespan psychology, learning and memory, psychopharmacology, diagnosis, case conceptualization, and neuroscience for clinicians, among others.  This day will be led by Linda, supported by Bill.

“Love is not just an idea.  Love is a living, breathing essence that the wise can pluck from the air at will and then like a master artist mold it into something beautiful.”
-- Syd Banks, Second Chance, pg. 115

A medicine, for Native Americans, is mystical spiritual presence and power that can manifest in a person, a place, in nature, or in a phenomenon.  Medicine is another name for Wisdom, the spiritual intelligence behind life, which is always guiding us. When something is “mystical” it is points to “belief in the existence of realities beyond perceptual or intellectual apprehension but central to being and directly accessible by intuition.” (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language)

Most of us do not know to look to our Minds for the answers we seek about how to live healthy, happy and productive lives, no matter what our age or circumstances. When we know where to look for answers, life can be gentler. When we recognize Wisdom, the everyday ordinariness of life can be magical, beautiful, meaningful and sacred. 

When life brings challenge, difficulty and pain, Medicine for moving through and healing from it is especially accessible.  Often, in such times, our first inclination is to look to thoughts stored in the brain for answers.  But the brain’s resources are limited. As the futility of figuring things out becomes apparent, surrender, a quieting, can occur.   In this quieter state, the veil between the physical and the spiritual thins, making it easier for us to notice wisdom.

During this presentation, Linda, supported by Bill, will use personal and professional stories to illustrate how wisdom shows up in the all-ness of life.  She will share how the Three Principles unify and clarify the understanding of things mystical, such as wisdom, intuition and synchronicity, bringing clear logic to that which is thought of in many disciplines as unscientific and unacceptable for conversation. For Linda, mystical awareness is entirely practical and ordinary.  It is the sustenance of the wise.

Linda often speaks of Medicine as “good”, “better” or “best.”  Good medicine is to be found in books, teachers, drugs – any external healing agent.  Better medicine is to be found in knowing how to work with energy in the body. The best medicine is found within, via a direct experience of Divine Wisdom. Join Linda in a conversation, at once practical and mystical, about the Medicine within that is always guiding us toward love and understanding, health and healing.

Learning Objectives

• Identify the purpose of the physiology & neurobiology of resilience when we are in a healthy state of mind.
• State the purpose of the body's emergency stress response.
• Identify the physiological and hormonal aspects of the body’s stress response.
• Identify how thought can inappropriately activate the body’s stress response.
• Define allostatic load, including the long term physiological and psychological burden of chronic activation of the stress response.
• State how an insight-based understanding of the Universal Principles behind the creation of the human experience can maximize the presence of optimal phycological and physiological functioning.
• Identify how unconditional love can manifest in individual well-being, relationships, and improved physical health.